Violet, Edward, and Herbert Bodman, Jr., 1929
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Family History
The history of this line of the Bodman family in the United States can be traced to John and Sarah Bodman, English immigrants to the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Migration of 1629-40. The Bodman Family Papers trace their descendants beginning with their son, Joseph Bodman (1659-1711), who was raised in Boston. He first saw the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts in 1675 as a soldier in King Philip's War. He returned to the area to homestead in the early 1680s, eventually settling in Hatfield, where the family was to remain for almost 100 years.
In the early 1770s, three of Joseph's great-grandsons left Hatfield for the new township of Williamsburg. Seventeenth and eighteenth century Bodmans, such as Joseph's grandson and namesake, Joseph (1731-1818), supported themselves by combining artisanry with subsistence farming. In the nineteenth century the scarcity of good land and the uncertainties of farming in New England led some Bodmans to join the westward migration, settling in New York, Ohio, and Illinois. Those who remained in Massachusetts tried new enterprises such as factory production at a sawmill and tannery in Williamsburg, shopkeeping in Charlemont, and banking in Conway and Northampton.
Beginning in the 1850s, investments in Illinois land led to family involvement in banking and grain merchandising that was to last well into the twentieth century. The firm of Milmine, Bodman and Co., founded in 1861 by Edward Cushman Bodman (1840-1917), grew from small-town bank (in Bement, Illinois) to an international grain brokerage firm by the early 1890s. In the mid-1970s, four Bodman cousins took an interest in their family's history and researched and wrote A Bodman Chronicle (Evansville, Ill.: privately printed, 1979).
Wedding of Violet Bodman and William Price, June 1946
Description of Papers
The Bodman Family Papers consist of 24 linear feet of biographical material, correspondence, diaries, financial and business records, genealogical research material, legal documents, memorabilia, photographs, writings, and miscellaneous papers of ten generations of Bodman family members dating from 1687 to 1980. The bulk of the material dates from the 1840s through the 1910s. The papers are an extremely rich source for the study of United States social history, providing a long-term look at an enterprising American family. The earliest material (1680s-1830s) documents rural New England life, primarily through financial records and legal instruments. Beginning in the 1830s such material is augmented by family and business correspondence documenting daily life and business ventures in New England and the Midwest. By the 1880s, with few Bodmans remaining in New England, the geographical center of the papers shifts to New York and the Midwest. For the period 1880-1920, family correspondence makes up a significant portion of the material, while business and financial records appear in much greater bulk than in the preceding generations, particularly in the papers of Edward Cushman Bodman (1840-1917). These materials are supplemented with diaries, memorabilia, photographs, writings, and papers relating to the World War I service of Herbert Luther, Sr. (1880-1958), and Theodora (Dunham) Bodman (1895-1983) (see also the Dunham Family). Family history has long been of interest to the Bodmans, and genealogical research material and notes can be found throughout the collection.
